EXAM 1: Lexical Development Flashcards
Classifications of words
Specific nominal (mom)
General nominal (cat)
Action words (go)
Modifiers (big)
Grammatical function words (is)
Personal Social words (no)
Prepositions/pronouns/articles
Open class words
New words can be added
Closed class words
New words not added, prepositions, pronouns, and articles
Noun Bias
Nouns make up the largest single category of infant’s first 10-50 words
May be different in differing countries
Conceptual Explanation of Noun Bias
Noun concepts are easier than verbs concepts
Nouns are more readily observable, but verbs are not (By the time you finish saying a verb, verb may already be finished) and doesn’t last
Basically, nouns are easier to learn and more readily available
Linguistic Explanation for Noun Bias
Nouns can be learned through observation only, but verbs need additional linguistic contexts (syntactic bootstrapping)
Syntactic Bootstrapping
Children draw on syntactic clues that the linguistic context provides in verb learning
Verb learning can be delayed because linguistic info is also not always readily available
Human Simulation Paradigm (HSP)
Proved syntactic bootstrapping
Study:
older kids/adults used in experiment to simulate infant learning/development
Child watches video…
-LI (without linguistic context) and just target word BEEP (N/V)
+LI (with linguistic context) and target word BEEP (N/V)
Question: Could they identify the target N/V with or without linguistic information?
Results: Participants more likely to identify N with just observations. V identified with linguistic information
Lexical Development
Developing mental lexicon
Vocab acquisition/word learning
Expressive vocab (Produce) and Receptive vocab (Understand); receptive vocab is more than expressive, gap widens
Intermodal Preferential Looking Paradigm (IPL)
Also proved syntactic bootstrapping
Study:
Children watched 2 scenes:
1. causative action of duck pushing rabbit
2. noncausative action of duck and rabbit waving
Children heard either:
1. Transitive verb “Duck is gorping the rabbit”
2. Nontransitive verb “Duck and rabbit are gorping”
Scenes were displayed on opposite sides
Question:
Which scene will children look at when they hear either transitive/nontransitive verb?
Result:
Children who heard transitive verb looked at causative scene, children who heard nontransitive verb looked at noncausative scene
Children integrated visual and sentence structural info to discover what verb was referring to
Transitive verb
Causative verb, subject and object
Nontransitive verb
Noncausative verb, no object
Ditransitive verb
Dative
Segmentation problem
Segmenting individual words from continuous stream of speech
uses statistical analysis with syllables to find words in speech stream
Mapping problem
What is the word referring to? referential ambiguity
Fast mapping
Immediately done after hearing
Mutual Exclusivity (Fast Mapping)
Assign the new word to new referrent, one object must only have one word to it
must overcome in order to learn different categories
Basic category words
Colloquial, common, learned first
Subordinate category words
Specific
Superordinate category words
Broadest
Joint Attention (Fast Mapping)
Babies are sensitive to sical cues, when adult and infant are joint attention, more mapping
sensitive to direction, gaze, all important in referrent identification
cannot be used alone since child may still point to wrong referrent
Linguistics (Fast Mapping)
Syntactic bootstrapping with verbs
Cross-situational mapping
Mapping done over multiple occasions
must remember previous occasions the object was mentioned and keep track of it
Whole-object Bias
One way infant may use to map
Word labels the whole object
Shape Bias
One way infant may use to map
word generalizes to same shaped objects
Taxonomic bias
One way infant may use to map
learn new words by grouping objects into categories based on shared characteristics
i.e. dax with a dog picture was more likely to be categorized with another dog than a thematic relation
Syntactic labeling problem
Is it transitive? Nontransitive?
Don’t know its grammatical structure/function
Individual differences in lexical development
Words used by children (by 3 y.o) were derived from parent’s vocab (the type of words lexical diversity and average words input)
Hart and Risley’s 1995 study
Took sample of 44 children
Showed that all were developing vocab regardless of SES, but the 3 groups (high SES, mid SES, low SES) all differed in vocab size
Showed disparity in vocab growth amongst children of different SES
higher SES = higher vocab
Matthew Effect
As they grew older, their differences increased
Correlated with parents vocab/speaking data
The primary care giver’s cumulative words addressed to child/input had exactly same pattern as the child’s vocab size
DRAWBACK: Only focused on primary caregiver input, no secondary or environment input
Still influential study
30 million word gap
Children from lower SES heard 30 million less words than higher SES kids
2018 study debunking H&R (1995)
Considered all speech from environment, used 42 sample size
Less SES heard more speech
2016 study of gender, daycare, and bilingualism
Study: Observed 51 children and their vocab sizes for german
only looked at expressive vocab
Similar SES
high quality daycare program
Questions:
Would girl v. boy vocab differ?
Would no daycare v. daycare differ?
Results:
All children developed German typically
No gender differences in vocab size, but different in vocab composition
No GENERAL differences between vocab size and comp between care groups
Girls without daycare before 2 years had more vocab than all subgroups
Children who had daycare generally positive correlation with vocab size
Teacher talking matters
Bilingual children had less vocab than monolingual children when looking at a single language
Vocab and Intellect
Pace of vocab growth related to cortical growth
Children with higher vocab better at reading
Reading related to academic achievements
Gesture usage predicative of vocab development
